Academic Engagement

Help us explore the affordances of academic blogging.

Help Us Explore

Blogging exercises have been used successfully across disciplines, from the humanities to social sciences to medicine. There are two main ways for instructors to assign blogging as write-to-learn in higher education:

Class blog: Students take turns to author short, personal reflective essays on a topic or theme related to the class. Instructors can also use blogs as a way to collect creative assignments that uses online tools, such as podcast and collaborative timeline project.

Student personal blogs: Students write personal reflective essays in a journal-like manner; instructors then curate blog posts to put on a class blog. When used consistently over a student’s career, a blog can take the form of an e-portfolio.

Specific examples:

Students in a language class can blog to practice their vocabulary and language skills; they can also establish a digital pen-pal relationship with students from other class sections or at other universities.

The instructor of a Latin American and Caribbean Studies course uses a course blog to display the outcome of his students’ collaborative timeline project. Students and the instructor contributed meaningful events, periods, and dates from course readings and outside sources to create an overarching timeline of the history of sciences and technologies in Latin America.

Students in an ethnomusicology course put their podcasts (course capstone project), which analyze the sonic history of objects of historical importance on their course blog. The blog format allows them to present images and other information that enriches their podcasts.

Year 1-2 Metrics

Faculty Participation

Course Utilization

Student Participation

Faculty and instructors can request class blogs for their courses by filling out the Class Blog Request form. All class blogs are fully supported by Academic Technology Solutions staff–we will help you set up the site, enroll your students, provide technical support, in class training, and more.

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